Creativity and Change: The more things change, the more the timeless stuff matters

Sitting in the Shakespeare Garden this morning, soaking up the sun and the homage to the Bard, I can’t help but think about the work of creativity, and its place in culture, and how that is subject to change over time, or not. Creative endeavors always bear the burden of every genius who came before. It’s as if the legacy is silently challenging the new to match its power. And already in biblical times there was “nothing new under the sun,” so attempting to put something new into the world can feel pointless.

Of course, one way of looking at it is that there legitimately are new developments — new technologies, new understandings of science and the nature of the universe — and that those might indeed give us something new to know, to study, to color our thinking, and it follows that we might have something new to write about, to sing about, to paint about.

But on the other hand, humanity is still humanity, and more to the point, a person is still a person, with all our famous failings and timeless shortcomings. In that sense, nothing at all has changed.

Recognizing those two ways of looking at the world leaves me feeling that the current emphasis of my work — how the new stuff, like tech and digital innovations and ubiquitous data collection — affects what is timeless about our understanding of what it is to be human, and how love happens in the world, and all about meaning, and purpose, and empathy. What it means to be a physical being in a world of virtual interactions and digitally projected aspirational selves. What the future may hold for us socially, culturally, and individually.

In a way, I’m sure it’s very much an of-the-moment question. And of course, abstracted from the specifics of technology, it’s no doubt the same question people have been asking for ages and will ask for all time.